My first year as a Londoner, part five: the Girlfriend

I have alluded here and there in the past few my blogs to my girlfriend of the time, GF. There were a few events that I could have written about previously but they are more suitable to write about here. This is the place where I become hard on myself: I considered myself to be sensitive, but the more that I look at it, I was sensitive when I was the recipient but less sensitive to other people, including GF. I'm sorry.

I have vaguely documented how we first met. Our first meeting in Britain was a few weeks after we returned (Sept 1972), naturally at 'the moadon', when a party was held for those emigrating to Israel that year. GF and I hung out together; someone who I vaguely knew (with a car) suggested that we go to his house for an hour or so (I don't remember now why). When we came back, our leader from the Israel summer camp was very angry with us, as GF's mother had called but GF was nowhere to be found. Contrite, GF went home (or so I thought). I, of course, stayed the night, sleeping in the basement that was later to be the 'cellar folk club'. Except that I didn't sleep: in those days, I found it difficult to fall asleep in unfamiliar surroundings, and anyway I was full of remorse for what happened in the previous evening.

Instead of going home by train to Bristol on Sunday morning, I decided that I would seek out GF and try to save something of the weekend. I knew her postal address and that it was somewhere near West Dulwich rail station, but that's all. Somehow I got to this station: like most South London stations, it's not an underground line so it wouldn't have been obvious to a non-Londoner how to get there. But get there I did, and by some remarkable serendipity*, I exited from the station, turning left; I continued walking a few hundred yards until I came to her road. I could easily have gone in the wrong direction, so at least someone above was looking out for me. Once on her road, I counted the numbers until I came to what must be her house. I knocked on the door and vaguely explained to whoever opened (her mother? sister?) who I was and that I had come to see GF. "But she's not here!", I was told. "She spent the night at her grandparents in Swiss Cottage". Of course! GF had told me at some stage that her grandparents lived reasonably close to 'the moadon', but I was so distraught that I had forgotten this. So I went back to the train station and thence to Swiss Cottage, found the address then talked with GF for an hour or two, trying to straighten things out.

During the year 1972-3, we met three or four times when I managed to come to London for a day or a weekend. I remember that in December 1972 we went to see "The man from the East", a musical show by Stomu Yamash'ta, that was being performed in Soho. I had come to this after reading a review then purchasing an earlier Yamash'ta record, "Floating music". Thinking about this now, I can see a similarity between this event and those that I mentioned in an earlier blog: these were all events that I suggested.

Our last meeting before we entered the 'jet-set' phase of our relationship would have been somewhere between May and July 1973. I doubt that I have mentioned this before, but GF was Australian and had moved to Britain in 1968. In June/July 1973 she flew to spend the summer (winter) in Australia and returned after I had left Britain for Israel in early September 1973. The next year, she flew again before I arrived back in Britain, so our next meeting was not to be until late September 1974.

I'm going to close what appears to be part one of a long blog by describing our first meeting in 1974. Purely by chance, although pertinent to what was to unfold, this happened to be the afternoon of the opening event of the Cellar folk club; we met by a cinema near Oxford Street in order to see 'O lucky man!' (yet another choice of mine, now that I think of it). Afterwards, I assumed that she would come with me to the folk club, but no, she had to go home for something. So we walked around the streets of London, heading for Victoria station (aha, that's how one gets to West Dulwich) with me trying to prevent the inevitable for as long as possible. I was severely disappointed, even annoyed, by her refusal: didn't she realise how important that evening would be? Looking back on this nearly 50 years later, I can see how insensitive I was to the wants and needs of other people, especially hers.

Here are a few lines of a song that I wrote a few years ago

I once thought I knew you: that's patently untrue
I barely knew myself so how could I know you?

(*) Thinking about this much later, I think that serendipity didn't have so much to do with finding her house. It's quite probable that there was a map of the area inside the train station at which I looked in order to find her street.